once again sir rick and the degikey as well as design news for this event...very much appreciated for an excellent presentation to us...i will be back by tomorrow to finished all the class for the one week allocation....

very interesting but too short of all presentations and discussions since day 1 class lesson. i don't have any objection all about, but needs more valuable definitions to be embedded in the slides and that much appreciated. i am now on slide 11 onwards to end of the presentation of sir rick.

Talking about software defined test equipment, my propscope from digikey arrived today. It's a whole bunch of measurement and signal generating test equipment for hobby level work. Digikey was the only place to have stock. It runs on an 8 core 32bit processor, each core runs at 20MIPS!

I am leaving this chat now, but it remains open to you. I will check back to respond to the questions and comments you leave, and I will check back before each day's webinar starts so that I may be able to respond within the webinar itself. Thank you for all of your comments, not just the flattering ones.

All of this week's slides are posted without notes. I suggest you download all of them and ask your questions now, so I can respond to them in more detail during the webinar. This will focus my remarks to your interests and also to those of others, and make the webinar stronger.

Rruther2: Hey my background sounds identical to yours, except for the broadcast engineering and BMEWS. Did you work at Gilmore Creek tracking station? I left Alyeska Pipeline in 2005 after 20 years... We have probably run into each other

I have sent the NI-related questions to them. I will send them links to the chat. I agree that we should not have an NI spokesperson attending. This is not an NI webinar. They have plenty of them archived on their website. If NI wants to get involved with this chat, they can.

Are there areas of test that are better served with hardware based testing equipment? I imagine as computers become more powerful every year that more can be done in software. I would also imagine that there still are areas that software based testing cannot reach. Can you think of any examples?

Yes, RickGoldberg is supposedly still here for another five-ten minutes; if you read the slides ahead of time you might have questions, otherwise read through quickly -- probably better to post questions to chat for answers (maybe) tomorrow...

Okay. Finally on the right day's lecture. Should have known when the audio was diverging so significantly from the slide deck... But since I got here a bit late, I'll have to request the slides-plus-notes and do some catchup, get ready for tomorrow.

jl, you DID miss this. If you just joined, you're hearing the archived audio ALREADY.

Rick, I just found a "product comparison" web page by Agilent, where they compare one of their stan alones against the NI offering. Looks like the test equipent companies are fighting back against the software based testing environment...

Rick, I have electronics background and I am an Industiral Automation engineer. Software is getting importance especially in HMI. What apporoach should I carry out. I mean my software knowledge is not as good as hardware.

@wpeters -yes TS does have a packaged deployment, but you have to purchase a deployment license. There are a few types. We choose the debug/deployment license, as it provides ability to edit at the tester. If you go with the cheaper standard deployment, you can't edit.

Concerning purpose built test equipment, just take a gander at Agilent's high end equipment for cell phone systems, Mpeg video data streams, or RF microwave equipment. Can software testing using something like NI's PXI express based modules match the complexity built into these stand alone Agilent testers?

Programmable power supplies have always been a problem for us. We need to be able to swap to a different one should it fail or recuire calibration and not all power supplies have the similar interfaces. Another problem is that some test require more than one supply so I don't want to have a top level that is the same for all supplies. I've heard that object orientation may solve this but I'm looking for examples.

@RICH: Some of us have expressed doubt on why the posted slides don't already have the detailed notes included. It will make everyone's live easier, eliminating all the e-mail to and from individual participants. Please, give us a feedback on that.

Regarding TestStand and "Ready to Run": With TestStand you can add your pre-existing test code to TestStand's test executive without too much difficulty. Your code can be C, C+ , LabVIEW, and others that I don't recall.

The streaming audio player will appear on this web page when the show starts at 2pm eastern today. Note however that some companies block live audio streams. If when the show starts you don't hear any audio, try refreshing your browser.

Hello all. I am trying something new today, using WiFi instead of 3G on my Android phone for the audio portion. However, the Digi-Key Continuing Education Center web site complains that I need to enable cookies for my login to be effective, despite the fact that cookies are actually enabled in my browser. This has happened once before, but everything worked normally despite the error message. Has anyone else run into this? Why does the site think cookies are disabled? Anybody know what it is really looking for?

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

Focus on Fundamentals consists of 45-minute on-line classes that cover a host of technologies. You learn without leaving the comfort of your desk. All classes are taught by subject-matter experts and all are archived. So if you can't attend live, attend at your convenience.